Public Sentiment

The unlawful doings in Hancock county are, as we expected, bringing the State into disgrace all over the Union. The press, every where, condemns, in the most emphatic and indigant [indignant] language the treatment which the Mormons have received. When an unprejudiced man seriously and candidly reflects on what has been done-when he thinks of the hundreds of houses burnt to the ground, and their bereaved and shivering inmates turned out to starve-when he reflects that a whole community of people are, in this enlightened age, and in this free country, driven out from the comforts and blessings of civilization into the wilderness on account of their religion -for that will be the verdict of the age and of posterity, that sectarianism alone, has thus expelled them-he must admit that disgrace will cleave to our institutions, as a consequence of these outrages.

From a New York Paper.

"A whole community of the people banished! driven violently from their homes, their farms, and their Church; their blood shed by lawless adventurers of Illinois and the State, either unable or unwilling to protect them! How are we as a nation to explain to a civilized world this dire calamity, this desecration of all that is free in our Government? Was it

the religion of the Mormons to which objections were made? We have no right to interfere with the religion of any person, if the pursuit of that religion interferes with no man's rights or property. Were the Mormons a rascally, lying, thieving race of people, as alleged? Then enforce the laws against all offenders. But to drive them, their wives and children beyond the Rocky Mountains, beyond the barriers of civilization, to take lawless possession of their farms and property, exceeds in iniquity everything that has been done in any country since the reign of the Goths and Vandals."

(->) So the truth, "because of offences [offenses]," comes out of their own mouths.

A still stranger specimen of the folly of this generation, is found in the last dying words of John Long upon the gallows, at Rock Island, before he was hung for the murder of Col. Davenport.

"Mobs, said the prisoner, have made men desperate. He represented that Wm. F. Fox happened to be at Belview at the time of the mob there, and had, up to that time been an honest man, but from that moment, he became a determined and abandoned and successful robber; it is in consequence of being indiscriminately lynched without proof of innocence or guilt, that the country is now filled with horse thieves and robbers all determined to be revenged for their injuries, and to sell their lives as dearly as possible."

Truly, our country is in a state of anarchy and desperation, and the expulsion of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter day Saints from her realms, solely because their religious privileges, and common rights of citizens, are not protected by the laws of the land, will open the highway of reserved rights, among desperadoes, passionate and disappointed men, and demagogues, and the fields and habitations of the freemen of these United States, as well as the lives of men, women and children, will be sacrificed on the same bloody altar, where they tried to offer the innocent saints as a "peace offering," to the angry god of misrule, rebellion, and cozened ambition. The pit they digged for their neighbor's sins, becomes the furnace of their affliction, and God blows the fire.